Seeing industrial services through experience lens - Revealing a customer experience map to design for an experiential service in B2B context

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Volume Title

School of Arts, Design and Architecture | Master's thesis
Location:
P1 OPINNÄYTTEET D 2016 Hu

Authors

Date

2016

Major/Subject

Mcode

Degree programme

Language

en

Pages

96+5

Series

Abstract

Nowadays, more and more companies become aware of the importance on experience investment, which not only brings customers pleasant and meaningful interactions during the business but also supports the company to formulate key brand differentiator compared to other competitors. Through the theoretical background research, it has been found that there is still a lack of academic studies and design cases about investigating industrial services with experiential thinking in business-to-business context. As a branch of UXUS research program, the thesis work relies on the case study in cooperation with Rolls-Royce Marine that deals with B2B transactions with customers. It depicts the exploration on how the customer experience map could be constructed under the product context ‘UUC azimuth thruster’ to support refining its industrial service through utilizing experience lens for the near future. Starting with project background introduction and study context definition, the objectives of this thesis have been framed as three research questions, which comprise of discovering the way to promote internal understanding on UUC customer journey as well as bringing the big picture of UUC customer service experience to in-house staff, and enhancing the focused service from the experiential aspect within a short-term outlook. After representing the literature review from both academic and practical domain, the in-house research is described about applying semi- structured interviews to map the industrial service process with touch points. It documents the identification regarding key service interactions and the internal standpoints about the customer service experience. The customer study process is explained then as collecting first-hand customer experience within the targeted UUC service scope, the information of customer journey context has been enriched at the same time. T o Integrate the internal and external study results, the first outcome of this thesis - UUC customer experience map has been uncovered to Rolls-Royce Marine. By identifying the key opportunity from the customer experience map, the thesis continues to illustrate the process of utilizing the experience goals for ideating the experience-driven actions that Rolls-Royce Marine could take on future service development. The developed concept is presented in detail as an experiential service story which has been further built up through information architecture, the flow of interaction and wireframes establishment, and Hi-Fi prototype creation. Lastly, the two outcomes of the thesis have been evaluated by internal experts to determine the directions for the following implementation. Through the in-house assessment, the customer experience map has been regarded as a valuable and meaningful tool that could help mapping the UUC customer journey and the related customer service experience. The re ned UUC service concept has also achieved quite positive feedback from the evaluators, which aims to boost the user experience both inside and outside the organization.

Description

Supervisor

Mattelmäki, Tuuli

Thesis advisor

Lu, Yichen
Lindborg, Iiro

Keywords

customer experience, user experience, experience-driven design, customer journey mapping, industrial service, business-to-business

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Citation